Glissant and Deleuze are shadows

"She ended up knowing so much that she could no longer interpret anything . There are no longer shadows to help her see more clearly, only glare. ( Henry James in Delueze and Guattari)

I feel like I am coming to the end of something. I am a becoming chrysalis, not a butterfly but the genetic soup that  can still twitch the cocoon on the outside,  like the flex of a liquid muscle. Reading Glissant and Delueze and Guattari on a morning and flopping around in the afternoon, writing fragments - six sentences at a time, like getting blood out of a stone.  Playing games of online poker with mental excuses running through my mind like the telecast of a news presenter. The weeks are all rolling together, the grass needs cutting, something different needs to happen.

The biggest thoughts of the week-

What it is for something to be opaque,

Why does Deleuze think it  so important to prick the life of the world with a pointed drill.

How smooth and striated space function to hold back chaos.  ( the thinking of them together and holding this)

How the encounter with art; when it is new (for the academic with plexi glass and colored oils  or ink and white paper) is something different to those of us who spend a life submerged in the flow of it, for good or bad.

I thought again of intermediality,  Fluxus raises its ugly head  working with unfixed forms or forms that are matter out of place in contexts like research or school.

The art world is striated space - culture is capitol and relative there is base and superstructure.

Glissant writes of the opaque and Deleuze and Guattarri write of facialisation.  They say to become a body without organs is dangerous and we should move gently into the valley.  They tell us the tool needed is a file not a hammer but ask us to stitch up all our holes, our mouths and anuses and cut new ones, the cutting is extreme the Body without Organs is a set of Punctions and ruptures.

Artaud coins the phrase but he is mad - he owns a walking stick that belongs to st Patrick to Jesus and the Devil and goes to Ireland to Galway to return  it to all three - this detour was a reminder of the stories that carry us away - I lost my great grandads walking stick because I had two many I was supposed to be looking after it as it connected to his hand as an extension of his body perhaps the lost walking stick of my grandad is a body without organs? I have no nowhere to return it to that is now and here.

I 'm lost in music caught in a trap there is no turning back.  Vaguely as I read on and find my organs receding   I am wondering if I am less afraid of dieing as I am dismantled in my oneness. I  hope this is the point of the effort, to be less frightened of my own death would be a result in terms of the difficulty of the journey.

I'm also working through an idea that the reason I couldn't make any work in my workshop was that it is separate from the world I work in - removed from the actual sites of practice, it is not a bad thing but currently makes no sense or is a (new)sense the term I'm coining along with other words I'm coining.

After word - The idea of performing artist is on my mind Judith Butler says that you perform who you are within the subjectivity of time rather than been an artists you are being been an artist  (or not).   So I'm performing been an artist by making art and referencing art - I'm turning an inflatable aubergine into a bean.  I am referencing a piece of work called the negative meaning wears the trousers - I am been both silly and clever I am bean a bean and performing being been an artist at the same time, it is and is not my masterpiece. It is one of the silliest things I have bothered investing my time in- it is how I feel - the work is too clever for its own good and too silly to be taken seriously.  Why is language full of homophones  if its intention is to make sense and not a (new)sense of itself.

Week 9 in the big brother House (new)sense

My daily regime is now established.  I get up about 8.30 and spend around 2 hours reading a Thousand Plateaus.  I normally manage about 15 pages, this is my main achievement for the day.  I don't find it difficult to read though I can see how the thinking grows in you and makes difficulties.  In the Plateau about sedimentation they refer to a story that I have read by Arthur Conan  Doyle.  This keeps coming back to me as its about digging so deep that we prick the earth and this is what they are hoping to achieve in their writing- dig so deep they prick the collective mind of thought. In saying mind of thought I flag I am understanding to an extent the assemblage with its back to the Abstract machine that is a body without organs that are all part of the same thing but hold a difference that is temporally located within Bergson's notion of time as subjectivity not something we are within but something we are of  (mind becomes both mined as in dug out mind as in mine and mind as in mind the gap- the minor parts of language) .   Everything is different but the same thing, all the concepts role together as do the days and this is the point I take a breath.  As a problem arises with a strand of a concept they tag on or jump to another concept and then say it's different but the same.  There is an ironic strand that flows through the book, at points they cross the philosophers 4th wall and like Lovejoy in the 90s speak directly to the reader or the camera to fill in some gaps in the plot.  These are always - we are bit sorry for making you read this stuff but it may be worth it for you  to stick with us - they are jolts and little wake ups (are you still there!).  I find them strangely absent in the secondary literature apart from Massumi who has adopted their trick to separate the dog from his vomit.

It is funny to look to Deleuze and Guattari to structure my open time, to mark the passing of the days.  I cannot imagine many things other than a long personal illness and recuperation that would afford an opportunity for paying such attention.  With this move towards a difference of understanding comes a slight smugness, an ability to spot the Deleuze in Glissant the lack of it in Bennet the hook and hold of it.  I think many people read it as one side of the Velcro and forget for it to be sticky you need both parts the hook bit and the eye bit.  But how to speak of this (New)sense to anybody living a normal life gets more and more difficult.  Even though the work is visceral and human and connected to the flow and rhythm of the everyday it is under the skin writing but not a tattoo. As written text  it is removed and reified the book and the sandal are both becoming objects. 

There are no notes but there is  deeper understanding. 1000 plateus is where the plain of consistency is established.  For me as someone who lives on the edge of nomadic madness, walks confidently in its shadow, the plain fits quite naturally into a life.  I think for most the plain offers an alternative - the points it surfaces as critique are useful for academics who have been schooled to think in certain ways.  The book is not a guide or against anything it is pure philosophy in the western tradition - as set out in What is Philosophy this is the production of NEW concepts on the plain of immanence and boy do they do that over and over again.

It is probably the book that has most changed me in the way I think I think and I'm only starting to be able to read it properly.  I am a coward Nomad who knows he is only happy when he is traveling, I am also the sailor who fell from grace with the sea. I am legion and we are many.

Getting a pickle

I did this drawing as a joke while I attended the Glissant reading group seminar.  That was yesterday, it was a joke for Kate Genever as it was referring to a drawing masterclass Anthony Gormley had done which irritated us both.   This week has felt mainly not to bad in terms of getting through it although at the back of my mind I keep getting in a pickle.

In simple terms after doing all the Odd jobs and bits and bots and pretending to be busy  I could be making art.  I have some ideas for my PhD and some thoughts of works I have never got around to doing and some stuff to learn about projection mapping and a feeling of self doubt.  I could also learn how to use Photoshop better and shift from final cut to Premiere as I am now paying for a subscription.  I now have space to get around to the things I thought I would do with space, well the only thing stopping me doing them was not having the space.

This morning I came up with my best excuse so far in that whatever I do apart from drawings with coffee and a Graphite pencil in the back of a notebook will become the 'thing '.  My arts practice is a bit of a mush but one of my few successes is to carry on as an artist but actually avoid the "thing' that art gets hung on.  I used to think of this as the simulacra.  I understood this to be the golden calf, the distraction away from the truth by the false idol or image of the truth.   I read in Jane Bennets Vibrant Matter that the simulacra is actually the essence of the thing that comes off as a skin and therefore communicates its thingness to the senses. In writing this down though I'm not sure it makes any sense or if I dreamed it.

The worry would be that anything that I made about something in my studio would become a representation of that thing rather than part of it.  The other bits and bots of art in the work that work l are always marginal but still part of the projects.  The unicorns horn, Carlos the Binauarial head, the pirate ships wheel, these things are minor gestures holding a position in the middle of things.

The idea of going to my Shed and renaming it studio and making an art object about a research project is not what I'm doing or what I'm interested in.  For me it would be a useful distraction but for the project this working with art at a distance and producing an object for an inevitable reductive decoding would be an abomination.  Like Freddy Kruger from the nightmare on Elemstrrt films - the bastard son of a 1000 maniacs.

This feels a useful way to think about the lack of desire to make anything.  Firstly why would I do something to muddy the already opaque water, secondly it would be confusing and deliberately distracting thirdly it would be bad art and bad research.  The good thing it makes me feel is I'm taking PhD research seriously and for this 6 weeks of locking down this is what I have been doing.  I have recognized that this is important, the writing reading and thinking. The making can wait until its on the inside again and not a thin skin like Teflon to fly off and strike my senses with its form but not let anything stick.   

lock down let down

I thought this picture would do. I've been saying its a group of art students making PPE equipment as a joke but does make me wonder what art can actually do in this crises.  Lighten the mood, could be one thing I suppose. 

I wake up everyday with the intention of trying to make some sort of sculpture out of the bits and bods that are left over from Abi's exhibition.  A constructionists hopscotch assemblage that I project images and films onto.  I've downloaded Naum Garbo's communist era manifesto about sculture, it's beautifully emphatic. The recording is from a free 45 inch single that was attached to an art mag in the 60's I'm sure this means something significant. It made me think how conceptual art and pop art  happened around the same time and wonder if one was a reaction to the other or just a fork in a river that we could then think of as a river as it happened before the end of history when rivers were still useful metaphors.

I got up and tried to read a chapter of 1000 plateaus, then I got distracted as it mentioned Arthur Conan Doyle and professor Challenger and  a book called When the world screamed.  I can vaguely remember the character from 1960's British films like At The Earths Core.  In the book he is formidable larger than life, disliked but respected, in the films I think he was slightly bumbling more idiot savant than force of nature.  The Chapter is called the geology of morals, it is a struggle and I have broken off to listen to a reading of the Doyle story on You Tube.   I wonder if this is what I was supposed to do, I read a bit of Conan Doyle science fiction as a teenager and am drawn to his strange spiritualism.  He also worked as a junior Doctor on Spital hill which is very close to my house.  I think that Deleuze and Guattari in choosing Challenger must be constructing the earth as living thing not as literally as Conan Doyle where volcanoes are spots and earth quakes shivers but also not as loosely as James Lovelock with his Gai theory.

And the pricking of the planet to hear it scream is a very funny approach to checking if it's alive or more to let it know that we, us humans are here on its surface.  All this said I did not fall into this chapter well with its Dali esk lobster illustration to kick it off.  Strata and layers and materials and planes and matter and materials and stuff that is and isn't part of the layers that face the body without organs and don't face it.  I wondered if some of the point was to dislodge the reader from a root of sense.  This is implied in the writing Deleuze and Guattari at a few points, though i suspect this may be Massumi as translator, cross the 4th wall and in a paragraph or two return to hold a hand a while, suggest that perhaps what you are looking for in the text was never there and all you need to take form this reading is this.  There is no single root/route to dig up or to follow.

Alongside this I read Glissant an altogether different text and difficult in its own way.  preparing to talk about it or listen to others talk about it later today.  I was moved by the start where I was put on a slave ship and taken across a sea of violence to a place of violence and I think told that this violence will shape who I and all my ancestors could ever be, not exile or nomad or migrant but something born of a violence that will never be left behind as I have nowhere to leave it but where I am.

I wonder what my excuse is for not making the sculpture even as an experiment and a bit of fun.  I think it may become a simulacra and a dangerous thing.  Stand in for what art can do, was doing on the project, be more than a game at the edges, attempt to redistribute the sensible in a direction that could be dangerous.  I don't think anyone could accept it as a playful distraction without a colosal amount of irreverence which would be counter productive.  I am making excuses but there is also nothing stopping me just having a go and seeing what comes out of it , to write a couple of days off to vanity and exploring materials.  On telly last night Anthony Gormly was making dots on blotting paper, he has OCD and it sometimes makes interesting art and sometimes makes dots on paper.

I like the chaos of this writing I want to be like professor Challenger proved right as the world screams.

Post -Qualtative research as a camping trip

I have been thinking of trying to write something about Post -Qualtative research using the metaphor of a camping trip.  I was doing this in my head to try and work out what the differences are between approaches.  I know this is going to be a very lame attempt but thought if I put it here and share it perhaps it would become a document people could add to and correct and eventually become a teaching tool for post grads.  This is an aspiration and not a prediction.

The camping trip is a metonym.  I have only just learnt what this means and although it sounds clever it is really just calling your vacuum cleaner a Hoover, or national government, Westminster.  I present the camping trip as metonym in the spirit of Lacans points de capiton the notion of the quilting button or tie that holds things close together but allows for separation. This is important as the camping trip as Metonym stands for a set of ideas that are similar but not the same.  These are specifically, new materialism, the ontological turn,  post-Cartesian and mostly anything with a flat ontology where the idea of the human is re-imagined.  To those of us who watch Gavin and Stacy its also a reference to uncle Brin's notorious fishing trip.

a general new materialist camping trip.

You pack the car but then decide to camp in your garden as it doesn't make much difference where you go.  There is no inside or outside of the tent but the tent is as important as anything else.  The people inside the tent and the people outside the tent are the same as is everything else.  This includes camping equipment and a moth that flutters around the gas lamp.  At night when we go to sleep even our dreams are part of the camping trip as thoughts even subconscious ones are things.  Deleuze and Guattari are inside the tent, they are talking about all sorts of crap as they have smoked a splith and they say that drugs are flaky so they are like dandruff.  They like camping because it reminds them nomads. Guattari reminds Deleuze to keep passing the open windows but he is sure to forget.

a new materilist camping trip with Karen Barad. 

You pack the car all your equipment is an apparatus that is completely entangled  with all other aspects  life, the fact you are going camping is entangled in the apparatus everything is apparatus which doesn't have any edges.  The inside of the tent is the same as the outside of the tent.  If you perform an agential cut by dividing the tent inside with an internal bedroom it doesn't really make any difference everything including the moth is complicit in what is going on.   Deleuze and Guattari are invited but decide not to come as the trip is really a science school outing and they do not wear the white coats of a royal science on the inside or the outside.



 a new materilist camping trip with Jane Bennet.

You pack the car and drive in a circle and come back to your garden but you experience it differently.  You notice a worm and see its Jiz which is like its life force and how it helps to turn the soil.  Your tent does not separate the inside from the outside but a life force that we can't say is god but looks a little bit like god flows between both. The moth and the lamp are sort of the same but you have a sneaky feeling that the moth is actually a bit more important than the lamp or for that matter a tent peg. Deleuze and Guattari are in the tent they are pissing in a pan because they have one and carefully pouring it out of the door flap so nobody can see them.  They secretly like been invited on the camping trip but  know that Jane doesn't really like them unless they are talking about worms and Jizz and they are keen not to be seen out with her.

 

 A camping trip with actor network theory. 

This camp is very organised the tent exists and it has an inside and an outside and everybody and everything are all part of the trip and they all support each other .  Without the camping trip nothing would really exist in any way shape or form that would make it worth talking about.  There are some big personalities on the trip its just unusual that one happens to be a moth and the other a match head.

A speculative realist camping trip.

Nobody gets in the car because they can't decide if it exists or not.  The tent can have an inside or an outside and it can exist anywhere.  Deleuze and Guattari are invited and even though they are both dead they turn up in the flesh not as spirits. Harman forgets his rucksack and has to borrow a sleeping bag and a camping kettle.  Loads of people turn up with high expectations but they don't know where to go or pitch their tent as it feels a bit like tomorrow could be cancelled due to lack of interest.

A research creation camping trip.

Everyone decides to sleep under the stars and that a tent is a structuralist imposition of the envelope that  could only be felt as global capitalism. Someone starts to whittle a stick with a penknife but half the group is concerned they are making a spear.  The other half think its the emergence of a nomadic war machine that will eventually change the state.  At 10.30 it gets cold and everyone decides to go home to their centrally heated houses in the suburbs because lighting a fire would make them part of the problem and not the solution.




 
 

Day 43 in the big brother house

When I took this photo of the old markets as they were demolished I thought of the Paul Nash painting. I first encountered  sea ice in York art gallery it is the painting that first drew me to art.  The image fits my memory of a lonely younger childhood and the fact I was always in the gallery on my own reminds me of this isolation.  Both images remind me of the first world war and the melancholic beauty of isolation,  feeling a long way away from the rest of the world and other people.

I'm writing to avoid reading.  I'm grinding through a thousand Plateaus and really enjoying the densely packed text.  I have done a close reading of the Nomadic war machine plateau and I am much the wiser though not in a conventional this is what it says way.  I am struck by the connections to Ruskin; the ideas of the Gothic and the idea of a "life force" seem very close to a Ruskinian way of thinking about the world.  I have found some writing about this but it's marginal, few of the writers actually bother to "get' Ruskin, to feel his orietation.  I suppose scholars are worlds apart in terms of areas of interest and nobody really sees the political critique in Ruskin unless you read him as a friend that needs forgiving.

In the bath this morning I had a thought about the ideas I was working with before Christmas and how this related to residency.   When Kate actually realised that the residency I kept speaking of was within  ESRI she referred to it as Russian dolls, I liked this. However as one doll opens you need to open a another  this unveiling requires a new layer of smoke and mirror.  A layer of the secret plan is exposed and somehow I needed to take the flow underground again. The secret plan only really works in terms of giving a direction of flow when it is submerged; on the surface it is to easy to know.  This is how clever scholars like Massumi use Deleuze they ingest him and then puke and shit him all over the world. As Massumi quotes Becket - Habit chains the dog to his own vomit. 

The interesting thing is that I was chained to my habits of residency at the start of the PhD process and I was trundling along fine in the bubble of my own world.  I thought that residency was a way that artists learnt to be present in new spaces, to understand them from a different perspective but to learn to dwell or bide a while in their own way. This way of working requires a settling in and a location of positions to map yourself into.  Reading about nomadology this week I have decided that this is the true nature of the residency, not the settling but the moving differently through space.  I think that the issue is that this moving often requires a strong subjective and to an extent fixed to a person to provide a sense of what is moving.  In simple terms this could be artistic expertise or institutional validation of a practice.  Because we are moving then we need to know where our edges are so we can move them along with us.  

What thinking the residency through the nomad can do is recognise the state of movement which is not related to fixed points.  Mostly when we think of movement we think about a journey that takes us from one place to another through a space which is mapped or mappable ( Striated).   The Nomad does not offer  a different way of moving it affords a different perception of space. Here space is open we can only travel through and between and there are no fixed locations, the desert and the steppe are unmapable ( smooth).  I think that this can make a new sense of residency and change the focus.  It requires a break with traditions and ideas of mastery expertise and training.  It asks questions of different types of knowing, a knowing that is to do with movement and not dwelling.  The contribution of nomadology is to suggest that the sets of relations or the assemblages are within a different space.  However much we strive for an alternative methods to understand the world the Universities construction of knowledge paradigms are exemplars of Striated rather than smooth space.  The Nomad is a nice way to think of myself and to explain away my lightness and inability to attach myself to territory.  The interesting thought from new materialism is what happens if the boundary of ourselves is less defined, if we think of flows and life forces rather than mastery and intentions.  I was thinking this through Dewey and the idea of art as always in process with no concept of finished object.  Perhaps this is what needs to be explained in a felt way, moved towards through a practice that is not located within a person. These thoughts are hard and useful.  In the Russian doll of my residency at ESRI I don't really find or feel this kind of thinking. When I encounter thought at the university it happens on the surface of things, what is thought to be underneath is not really changed.

I started writing this as a return to thinking about the post -qualitative and  why it was important.  I have tried to explain this to people outside of universities and it seems really pointless.  For most people and for me when I was outside the university the really good thing that it could offer was a structured approach and structured thought.  For example a discourse analysis can point to how a text reinforces patriarchy. An ethnographic study can draw attention to important parts of culture that  are normally obscure.  This system at its edges looks to nomadology to crack some of its striations, to frack the system to let out something useful, the rhizome replaces the Arbor because the tree can only produce a certain type of fruit. The university however remains an orchard cultivating the same apples and pears.  When I started this work I was a vagabond, journeyman,  itinerant,  diddycoy I have been taken in but the shelter I've been offered is not really a good fit.  I enjoy been on the outside of the glass house so I can through stones.

Tuesday morning

Today feels a bit random.  I have this in lock down problem in that I feel like I should make some art but the kind of art I could make would be out of context.  It would be a performance to prove a point but I don't know what the point would be.

The art I have been thinking of making was an assemblage of bits and bods from the project with Abi making a sort of sculpture and projecting onto it referencing russian constructivism. The idea was to try and make something physical, a sculpture  and see what would come out of it - stuff comes from stuff - an experiment in material traces. When it was something that I couldn't find the time to get around to it presented a goal I secretly believed I was frustrated in not been able to realise.  It was some sort of attempt to redistribute the sensible - to make this action part of my research, but it was not a very coherant thing.

The problem is in the current context the idea does not have enougth weight to drive itself forward.  It's a sad truth.  It's also that as an idea it has a massive potential to be miss read - there seems little place for irony in my current world and my minor art that hangs from a sleder thread cannot carry the weight of it.

I think it would be better to do something completely different but that different thing also eludes me.

Today I applied to be part of the Yorkshire sculpture network.  I wrote this blog. I did all the final evaluation for my arts council project. This felt like a wet fart at the moment of pressing send no real bronx cheer.   If the art making is entangled with the research then it cannot sit outside of it to the extent where everyone sees it as separate.  I wonder if this is the reason I can't commit to workshop time, a fear of discovering myself adrift on the outside of everything.

When I walked down the canal yesterday I could hear the foundaries and distant noise of machinery and people at work, muffled radio stations drifting from ventilation pipes.  All the time the birds singing and the water offering a very special still silence to the mix.  I thought about recording it on my reel-to-real tape.  This is the redistribution of the sensible the lock down has brought us but as I try and grasp a bit of it it suddenly becomes stupid.  I feel like a reverse Midas turning the gold of art thoughts to the reality of the world. Some days we lose our way.

Perhaps I need to go for a long walk and then cook tea- activities that do not need irony or blogs to justify them will see us through.